1. Technical Field
The field of the currently claimed embodiments of this invention relates to imaging systems, and more particularly to compressive imaging systems.
2. Discussion of Related Art
Ultrahigh-speed continuous imaging is a key enabling technology for investigations throughout the life and physical sciences. Though burst imaging systems such as CMOS and CCD imaging arrays with in situ storage are useful for observing isolated events, many applications (e.g. high-throughput diagnostics) necessitate continuous imagers, which require considerable hardware resources to record streams of high-speed image data. Architectures based on photonic time-stretch have made significant achievements in ultrahigh-speed continuous imaging. However, such approaches remain fundamentally limited in speed, resolution, and image quality by the measurement rate of electronic digitizers. Both conventional CCD arrays and photonic time-stretch enabled systems such as serial time-encoded amplified microscopy (STEAM) read out the pixel information serially with a single analog to digital converter (ADC), fixing the number of pixels acquired per second at the sampling rate of the ADC.
Real signals such as most natural images are highly compressible and contain far less information than their full bandwidth suggests, which has been demonstrated by the success of modern data compression algorithms such as JPEG and MPEG. Recent work applying the theory of compressed sensing (CS) indicates that, due to their compressibility, real signals can be acquired with far fewer measurements than conventionally deemed necessary. Thus cutting-edge ultrahigh-speed imaging systems are inefficient, collecting far more data than is required to accurately characterize the signals of interest and thus limiting their potential operating rate.